Yann LeCun

Yann LeCun is Vice President and Chief AI Scientist at Meta and Silver Professor at New York University (NYU) affiliated with the Courant Institute, the Center for Data Science, the Center for Neural Science and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. He was the founding Director of Facebook AI Research and of the NYU Center for Data Science.

He received the Electrical Engineer Diploma from ESIEE, Paris, and a PhD in computer science from Sorbonne Université. After a postdoc at the University of Toronto, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories, later becoming the head of the Image Processing Research Department at AT&T Labs-Research. He joined NYU as a professor in 2003, following a brief period at the NEC Research Institute (Princeton). In 2012. He became the founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science. In late 2013, he was named Director of AI Research at Facebook, remaining on the NYU faculty part-time. He held a visiting professor chair at Collège de France in 2015-2016.

His current interests include AI, machine learning, computer perception, robotics, and computational neuroscience. He is best known for his contributions to deep learning and neural networks, particularly the convolutional network model which is very widely used in computer vision and speech recognition applications. LeCun has published over 190 papers on these topics as well as on handwriting recognition, image compression, and dedicated hardware for AI.

LeCun is founder and general co-chair of ICLR and has served on several editorial boards and conference organizing committees. He is co-chair of the program Learning in Machines and Brains of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He has been on the science advisory board of IPAM and the board of trustees of ICERM. He has advised many companies and co-founded startups Elements Inc. and Museami.

LeCun is in the New Jersey Inventor Hall of Fame. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the French Académie des Sciences. He is a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, a fellow of AAAI and AAAS, the recipient of the 2014 IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award, the 2015 IEEE PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award, the 2016 Lovie Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 University of Pennsylvania Pender Award, and honorary doctorates from IPN, Mexico and EPFL.

LeCun is the recipient of the 2018 ACM Turing Award (with Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio) for "conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing".